Martin Pool's blog

Python secsh-filexfer

I wrote a short implementation of secsh-filexfer in Python yesterday. It worked pretty well: it can successfully connect to the sftp server in OpenSSH, and open, read and write files. It's very nice and straighforward. Doing e.g. "futures" to support pipelined operations should also work very well in Python.

I am trying to suppress the urge to write it in C. Python is far quicker to write but I have this nagging feeling that I will need to go to C eventually to win benchmarks and so I might as well do it now. But I think I can stick with Python for a bit longer.

I think this will work out pretty well as a new rsync-like transport. The protocol needs to be extended in a few ways but there are standard extension breakouts to do that.

JW suggests that we can use "reverse rsync" for downloads so that less intelligence is required on the server.

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